Why I Don’t Use a Traditional Planner Anymore (and What I Use Instead)
I love planners. I have always loved planners. When I was homeschooled, I would religiously fill out my student planner and use all the stickers and fun doodads that come with planners. I continued to love and use planners as I went to college and started working and started homeschooling, but slowly things started getting a little out of hand.
I was using one planner for work, along with a project management app, another planner for homeschool, along with some notes in my Notes app, another planner for home management, along with another app for meal planning. And it was all too much.
As a working homeschool mom, traditional planners don’t work for me. Here’s why and here’s what I use instead.
Why Traditional Planners Don’t Work for Me
They Focus on One Part of Life
Traditional planners are designed to organize one specific part of life. They’re made to manage work tasks or they’re made to manage homeschool planning or they’re made to handle home management tasks. But they aren’t made to organize all of it.
For a season, I tried to work all of my different types of tasks, work and personal, into my one paper planner, but there were only 10-15 lines to write tasks for each day, and it felt confusing and not all that helpful to have my work tasks mingled in with “mop the floor”.
They Create More Work and Mental Clutter
If you’re anything like me, your mind feels full and busy. The mental weight of motherhood is heavy and even more so when you’re balancing work and homeschool. Your planner should lift the mental weight not increase it, but that was definitely not the case for me when I was trying to use multiple planners.
Carrying around multiple planners and flipping back and forth throughout the day was causing more work, not less.
Beyond the logistical challenge of having multiple planners to tote around, I also started forgetting where I had written my notes. I would remember that I had written them… somewhere… but I couldn’t remember where. Were they in my work planner? Notes app? Homeschool planner? Notebook? I genuinely couldn’t remember, and it felt like one more thing I had to keep track of.
They Make It Challenging to Prioritize Daily Tasks
One of my primary frustrations with traditional planners and using a variety of different planners for different areas of my life is that it’s incredibly hard to get a clear idea of what my day will actually look like. I don’t want to have look in three different places to know what I need to do each day.
Some days require more of my time to be focused on work, while some days require more of my time to be spent on homeschool or housework. But traditional planners don’t make it easy to make these priority shifts each day.
They’re Not Flexible
I think we can all admit that life as a busy mom doesn’t always go to plan. You can plan out a great day, with margin time factored in to accommodate for the unexpected, and then the unexpected happens and still throws you completely off plan.
Traditional planners don’t handle this kind of flexibility well. A task that isn’t accomplished one day has to be rewritten the next day and it may require quite a bit of erasing and rearranging if you’ve planned out a full week ahead of time.
They’re Expensive
This is a hard one for me to admit, because a good planner feels worth the money to me. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, so planning is crucial to managing a busy life and is therefore worth the investment.
But the cost of planners absolutely adds up. Many planners cost around $30 per planner and only last for one year or, worse, one quarter, and then you have to purchase a new one. If you add on multiple types of planners – a paper planner for work, a paper planner for homeschool, etc – it gets expensive quickly. I’ve absolutely spent upwards of $150 on planners over the course of a year.
What I Use Instead
After using traditional planners while trying to work and homeschool for a full year, I reached the end of my rope. I was completely burnt out. I felt like I was failing at everything – work, homeschool, keeping my house clean. I honestly began to wonder if this would be sustainable long-term. And, eventually, I knew I needed a better system.
So I created something that would work for me. Something that would solve all of the struggles I had with traditional planners. Something specific to my life as a working homeschool mom.
Enter the Presently Productive System.
The System was created over the course of several months. Starting from a completely blank slate, I had a big picture in mind and then added to it over time. I’ve now been using it for almost a year and I can’t imagine managing my life without it.
The Presently Productive System allows me to keep all of my tasks and notes for work, homeschool, home management, and personal projects all in one space. I can see everything in one glance or I can filter out to only see work tasks, etc.
Because everything is one space, I know exactly where to look for everything and I can plan my days easily. When my plans change or a task goes undone, I simply change the date on that task or click and drag it to the new due date in a fraction of a second.
And the best part? This one system will work forever. No need to continue to purchase new planners or tools.
One Last Note
My life (and, likely, yours too) is too complex for traditional planners. If you work and homeschool and your current mental load feels heavy, I highly recommend trying something new. Living in a state of overwhelm isn’t sustainable for you or your family, and you don’t need to continue down a path that’s not working for you.
My prayer is that, regardless of what planning system or task management tools you use, you are thriving in your roles both in and out of the home.
